Nuts and Bolts of my Weather Website

Hardware involved in the weather web site:

The Reata Place Weather web site uses many different technologies to create the weather page. In this article seven will be discussed to provide a behind the scenes look into each of these technologies to give you an understanding of how the weather web site works.

Weather Station

Data Logger

Web Camera

Weather Station Software

Daily Weather Import Software

Website

Weather Station:

The weather station is a Davis Instruments Wireless Vantage Pro 2 Plus. The Weather Station gathers weather readings using three major components: The Integrated Sensor Suite, the anemometer and wind vane, and the Console (the brains).

The Temperature and Humidity sensors are housed in a radiation shield at the bottom of the ISS. The Radiation shield protects these sensors from direct heat from the sun and provides a more accurate temperature reading.

Anemometer and Wind Vane

The anemometer and wind vane sensors are located separate from the ISS, in my case they are on top of my roof. This isn't the ideal spot, but it's what my HOA would allow. The Anemometer measures the wind speed. The wind vane measures the direction and provides a nice roost for mockingbirds.

Davis Vantage Pro Console

The above sensors all communicates via wireless with the Weather Station console and it displays the readings on it's screen. The Barometer sensor is located in the console. The console performs most of the weather related calculations, evapotranspiration, Moon Day, Dew Point, Heat Index, Wind Chill, etc.

Data Logger:

The Weather Station has collected all of the weather data and displayed it on the console. To get that data from the console into a program(s) to generate the website I use Davis' Weather Link. Weather Link is a hardware extension to the Weather Station Console that relays the data from the console via USB to Weather Link. The Weather Link data logger also stores weather information for download later in the event the connection is broken.

Web Camera

I use an Axis 2100 Network Camera to capture weather images from an office window. One of the nice things about this camera is, because it's on the network I can access it from any computer.

Weather Station Software

Raw data is collected from the weather station console by wview through Weather Link (hardware) via USB port. Wview also takes care of communication to Weather Underground and CWOP. HTML and graphics are generated by custom software written in PHP. The basic functions are:

Daily Weather Import Software

This is a program I wrote that runs every minute and takes the raw sensor data from wview and loads it into a MySQL database. This database has several summary tables in addition to the minute-by-minute raw data. The database is the final storage place for my weather data. On a side note, I've been collecting weather data since September 22, 2000 when I received my first weather station as a wedding anniversary present. As of July 21, 2009, I have 4,452,323 total weather data records. For those who don't know very much about databases, they are a fantastic way to store data. Almost 9 years of data uses only 332MB!

Website

The final component is the Website itself. As alluded to above the Weather Station software generates the HTML and collects information from the web camera and database. The final step is a sFTP script to upload all of the Images, HTML, and RSS to the website. This process runs every 15 minutes.

Thank You!

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you found this article enlightening. Most of all I hope you find the website useful! It's been a fun hobby of mine and I enjoy providing the service. Scott Carr